The English race are reputed morose. I do not know that they have
sadder brows than their neighbors of northern climates. They are sad by
comparison with the singing and dancing nations: not sadder, but slow
and staid, as finding their joys at home. They, too, believe that where
there is no enjoyment of life, there can be no vigor and art in speech
or thought; that your merry heart goes all the way, your sad one tires
in a mile. This trait of gloom has been fixed on them by French
travellers, who, from Froissart, Voltaire, Le Sage, Mirabeau, down to
the lively journalists of the _feuilletous_, have spent their wit on the
solemnity of their neighbors. The French say, gay conversation is
unknown in their island: the Englishman finds no relief from reflection
except in reflection: when he wishes for amusement, he goes to work: his
hilarity is like an attack of fever. Religion, the theatre, and the
reading the books of his country, all feed and increase his natural
melancholy. The police does not interfere with public diversions. It
thinks itself bound in duty to respect the pleasures and rare gayety of
this inconsolable nation; and their well-known courage is entirely
attributable to their disgust of life.
I suppose their gravity of demeanor and their few words have obtained
this reputation. As compared with the Americans, I think them cheerful
and contented. Young people, in our country, are much more prone to
melancholy. The English have a mild aspect, and a ringing, cheerful
voice. They are large-natured, and not so easily amused as the
southerners, and are among them as grown people among children,
requiring war, or trade, or engineering, or science, instead of
frivolous games. They are proud and private, and, even if disposed to
recreation, will avoid an open garden. They sported sadly; _ils
s'amusaient tristement, selon la coutume de leur pays_, said Froissart;
and, I suppose, never nation built their party walls so thick, or their
garden fences so high. Meat and wine produce no effect on them: they are
just as cold, quiet, and composed, at the end, as at the beginning of
dinner.
The reputation of taciturnity they have enjoyed for six or seven hundred
years; and a kind of pride in bad public speaking is noted in the House
of Commons, as if they were willing to show that they did not live by
their tongues, or thought they spoke well enough if they had the tone of
gentlemen. In mixed company, they shut their mouths. A Yorkshire
mill-owner told me, he had ridden more than once all the way from London
to Leeds, in the first-class carriage, with the same persons, and no
word exchanged. The club-houses were established to cultivate social
habits, and it is rare that more than two eat together, and oftenest one
eats alone. Was it then a stroke of humor in the serious Swedenborg, or
was it only his pitiless logic, that made him shut up the English souls
in a heaven by themselves?
They are contradictorily described as sour, splenetic, and
stubborn,--and as mild, sweet, and sensible. The truth is, they have
great range and variety of character. Commerce sends abroad multitudes
of different classes. The choleric Welshman, the fervid Scot, the
bilious resident in the East or West Indies, are wide of the perfect
behavior of the educated and dignified man of family. So is the burly
farmer; so is the country 'squire, with his narrow and violent life. In
every inn, is the Commercial-Room, in which 'travellers,' or bagmen who
carry patterns, and solicit orders, for the manufacturers, are wont to
be entertained. It easily happens that this class should characterize
England to the foreigner, who meets them on the road, and at every
public house, whilst the gentry avoid the taverns, or seclude themselves
whilst in them.
But these classes are the right English stock, and may fairly show the
national qualities, before yet art and education have dealt with them.
They are good lovers, good haters, slow but obstinate admirers, and, in
all things, very much steeped in their temperament, like men hardly
awaked from deep sleep, which they enjoy. Their habits and instincts
cleave to nature. They are of the earth, earthy; and of the sea, as the
sea-kinds, attached to it for what it yields them, and not from any
sentiment. They are full of coarse strength, rude exercise, butcher's
meat, and sound sleep; and suspect any poetic insinuation or any hint
for the conduct of life which reflects on this animal existence, as if
somebody were fumbling at the umbilical cord and might stop their
supplies. They doubt a man's sound judgment, if he does not eat with
appetite, and shake their heads if he is particularly chaste. Take them
as they come, you shall find in the common people a surly indifference,
sometimes gruffness and ill temper; and, in minds of more power,
magazines of inexhaustible war, challenging
"The ruggedest hour that time and spite dare bring
To frown upon the enraged Northumberland."
They are headstrong believers and defenders of their opinion, and not
less resolute in maintaining their whim and perversity. Hezekiah
Woodward wrote a book against the Lord's Prayer. And one can believe
that Burton the Anatomist of Melancholy, having predicted from the stars
the hour of his death, slipped the knot himself round his own neck, not
to falsify his horoscope.
Their looks bespeak an invincible stoutness; they have extreme
difficulty to run away, and will die game. Wellington said of the young
coxcombs of the Life-Guards delicately brought up, "But the puppies
fight well"; and Nelson said of his sailors, "They really mind shot no
more than peas." Of absolute stoutness no nation has more or better
examples. They are good at storming redoubts, at boarding frigates, at
dying in the last ditch, or any desperate service which has daylight and
honor in it; but not, I think, at enduring the rack, or any passive
obedience, like jumping off a castle-roof at the word of a czar. Being
both vascular and highly organized, so as to be very sensible of pain;
and intellectual, so as to see reason and glory in a matter.
Of that constitutional force, which yields the supplies of the day, they
have the more than enough, the excess which creates courage on
fortitude, genius in poetry, invention in mechanics, enterprise in
trade, magnificence in wealth, splendor in ceremonies, petulance and
projects in youth. The young men have a rude health which runs into
peccant humors. They drink brandy like water, cannot expend their
quantities of waste strength on riding, hunting, swimming, and fencing,
and run into absurd frolics with the gravity of the Eumenides. They
stoutly carry into every nook and corner of the earth their turbulent
sense; leaving no lie uncontradicted, no pretension unexamined. They
chew hasheesh; cut themselves with poisoned creases; swing their hammock
in the boughs of the Bohon Upas; taste every poison; buy every secret;
at Naples, they put St. Januarius's blood in an alembic; they saw a hole
into the head of the "winking Virgin," to know why she winks; measure
with an English foot-rule every cell of the Inquisition, every Turkish
caaba, every Holy of holies; translate and send to Bantley the arcanum
bribed and bullied away from shuddering Bramins; and measure their own
strength by the terror they cause. These travellers are of every class,
the best and the worst; and it may easily happen that those of rudest
behavior are taken notice of and remembered. The Saxon melancholy in
the vulgar rich and poor appears as gushes of ill-humor, which every
check exasperates into sarcasm and vituperation. There are multitudes
of rude young English who have the self-sufficiency and bluntness of
their nation, and who, with their disdain of the rest of mankind, and
with this indigestion and choler, have made the English traveller a
proverb for uncomfortable and offensive manners. It was no bad
description of the Briton generically, what was said two hundred years
ago, of one particular Oxford scholar: "He was a very bold man, uttered
anything that came into his mind, not only among his companions, but in
public coffee-houses, and would often speak his mind of particular
persons then accidentally present, without examining the company he was
in; for which he was often reprimanded, and several times threatened to
be kicked and beaten."
The common Englishman is prone to forget a cardinal article in the bill
of social rights, that every man has a right to his own ears. No man
can claim to usurp more than a few cubic feet of the audibilities of a
public room, or to put upon the company the loud statements of his
crotchets or personalities.
But it is in the deep traits of race that the fortunes of nations are
written, and however derived, whether a happier tribe or mixture of
tribes, the air, or what circumstance, that mixed for them the golden
mean of temperament,--here exists the best stock in the world,
broad-fronted, broad-bottomed, best for depth, range, and equability,
men of aplomb and reserves, great range and many moods, strong
instincts, yet apt for culture; war-class as well as clerks; earls and
tradesmen; wise minority, as well as foolish majority; abysmal
temperament, hiding wells of wrath, and glooms on which no sunshine
settles; alternated with a common-sense and humanity which hold them
fast to every piece of cheerful duty; making this temperament a sea to
which all storms are superficial; a race to which their fortunes flow,
as if they alone had the elastic organization at once fine and robust
enough for dominion; as if the burly, inexpressive, now mute and
contumacious, now fierce and sharp-tongued dragon, which once made the
island light with his fiery breath, had bequeathed his ferocity to his
conqueror. They hide virtues under vices, or the semblance of them. It
is the misshapen hairy Scandinavian troll again, who lifts the cart out
of the mire, or "threshes the corn that ten day-laborers could not end,"
but it is done in the dark, and with muttered maledictions. He is a
churl with a soft place in his heart, whose speech is a brash of bitter
waters, but who loves to help you at a pinch. He says no, but serves
you, and your thanks disgust him. Here was lately a cross-grained
miser, odd and ugly, resembling in countenance the portrait of Punch,
with the laugh left out; rich by his own industry; sulking in a lonely
house; who never gave a dinner to any man, and disdained all courtesies;
yet as true a worshipper of beauty in form and color as ever existed,
and profusely pouring over the cold mind of his countrymen creations of
grace and truth, removing the reproach of sterility from English art,
catching from their savage climate every fine hint, and importing into
their galleries every tint and trait of sunnier cities and skies; making
an era in painting; and, when he saw that the splendor of one of his
pictures in the Exhibition dimmed his rival's that hung next it,
secretly took a brush and blackened his own.
They do not wear their heart in their sleeve for daws to peck at. They
have that phlegm or staidness, which it is a compliment to disturb.
"Great men," said Aristotle, "are always of a nature originally
melancholy." 'T is the habit of a mind which attaches to abstractions
with a passion which gives vast results. They dare to displease, they
do not speak to expectation. They like the sayers of No, better than
the sayers of Yes. Each of them has an opinion which he feels it
becomes him to express all the more that it differs from yours. They
are meditating opposition. This gravity is inseparable from minds of
great resources.
There is an English hero superior to the French, the German, the
Italian, or the Greek. When he is brought to the strife with fate, he
sacrifices a richer material possession, and on more purely metaphysical
grounds. He is there with his own consent, face to face with fortune,
which he defies. On deliberate choice, and from grounds of character,
he has elected his part to live and die for, and dies with grandeur.
This race has added new elements to humanity, and has a deeper root in
the world.
They have great range of scale, from ferocity to exquisite refinement.
With larger scale, they have great retrieving power. After running each
tendency to an extreme, they try another tack with equal heat. More
intellectual than other races, when they live with other races, they do
not take their language, but bestow their own. They subsidize other
nations, and are not subsidized. They proselyte, and are not
proselyted. They assimilate other races to themselves, and are not
assimilated. The English did not calculate the conquest of the Indies.
It fell to their character. So they administer in different parts of
the world, the codes of every empire and race: in Canada, old French
law; in the Mauritius, the Code Napoleon; in the West Indies, the edicts
of the Spanish Cortes; in the East Indies, the Laws of Menu; in the Isle
of Man, of the Scandinavian Thing; at the Cape of Good Hope, of the Old
Netherlands; and in the Ionian Islands, the Pandects of Justinian.
They are very conscious of their advantageous position in history.
England is the lawgiver, the patron, the instructor, the ally. Compare
the tone of the French and of the English press: the first querulous,
captious, sensitive, about English opinion; the English press is never
timorous about French opinion, but arrogant and contemptuous.
They are testy and headstrong through an excess of will and bias;
churlish as men sometimes please to be who do not forget a debt, who ask
no favors, and who will do what they like with their own. With
education and intercourse these asperities wear off, and leave the
good-will pure. If anatomy is reformed according to national
tendencies, I suppose, the spleen will hereafter be found in the
Englishman, not found in the American, and differencing the one from the
other. I anticipate another anatomical discovery, that this organ will
be found to be cortical and caducous, that they are superficially
morose, but at last tender-hearted, herein differing from Rome and the
Latin nations. Nothing savage, nothing mean resides in the English
heart. They are subject to panics of credulity and of rage, but the
temper of the nation, however disturbed, settles itself soon and easily,
as, in this temperate zone, the sky after whatever storms clears again,
and serenity is its normal condition.
A saving stupidity masks and protects their perception as the curtain of
the eagle's eye. Our swifter Americans, when they first deal with
English, pronounce them stupid; but, later, do them justice as people
who wear well, or hide their strength. To understand the power of
performance that is in their finest wits, in the patient Newton, or in
the versatile transcendent poets, or in the Dugdales, Gibbons, Hallams,
Eldons, and Peels, one should see how English day-laborers hold out.
High and low, they are of an unctuous texture. There is an adipocere in
their constitution, as if they had oil also for their mental wheels, and
could perform vast amounts of work without damaging themselves.
Even the scale of expense on which people live, and to which scholars
and professional men conform, proves the tension of their muscle, when
vast numbers are found who can each lift this enormous load. I might
even add, their daily feasts argue a savage vigor of body.
No nation was ever so rich in able men: "Gentlemen," as Charles I. said
of Strafford, "whose abilities might make a prince rather afraid than
ashamed in the greatest affairs of state": men of such temper, that,
like Baron Vere, "had one seen him returning from a victory, he would by
his silence have suspected that he had lost the day; and, had he beheld
him in a retreat, he would have collected him a conqueror by the
cheerfulness of his spirit."[10]
[10] Fuller. Worthies of England.
The following passage from the Heimskringla might almost stand as a
portrait of the modern Englishman: "Haldor was very stout and strong,
and remarkably handsome in appearances. King Harold gave him this
testimony, that he, among all his men, cared least about doubtful
circumstances, whether they betokened danger or pleasure; for, whatever
turned up, he was never in higher nor in lower spirits, never slept less
nor more on account of them, nor ate nor drank but according to his
custom. Haldor was not a man of many words, but short in conversation,
told his opinion bluntly, and was obstinate and hard; and this could not
please the king, who had many clever people about him, zealous in his
service. Haldor remained a short time with the king, and then came to
Iceland, where he took up his abode in Hiardaholt, and dwelt in that
farm to a very advanced age."[#]
[#] Heimskringla, Laing's translation, Vol. III. p. 37.
The national temper, in the civil history, is not flashy or whiffling.
The slow, deep, English mass smoulders with fire, which at last sets all
its borders in flame. The wrath of London is not French wrath, but has
a long memory, and, in its hottest heat, a register and rule.
Half their strength they put not forth. They are capable of a sublime
resolution, and if hereafter the war of races, often predicted, and
making itself a war of opinions also (a question of despotism and
liberty coming from Eastern Europe), should menace the English
civilization, these sea-kings may take once again to their floating
castles, and find a new home and a second millennium of power in their
colonies.
The stability of England is the security of the modern world. If the
English race were as mutable as the French, what reliance? But the
English stand for liberty. The conservative, money-loving, lord-loving
English are yet liberty-loving; and so freedom is safe: for they have
more personal force than other people. The nation always resist the
immoral action of their government. They think humanely on the affairs
of France, of Turkey, of Poland, of Hungary, of Schleswig Holstein,
though overborne by the statecraft of the rulers at last.
Does the early history of each tribe show the permanent bias, which,
though not less potent, is masked, as the tribe spreads its activity
into colonies, commerce, codes, arts, letters? The early history shows
it, as the musician plays the air which he proceeds to conceal in a
tempest of variations. In Alfred, in the Northmen, one may read the
genius of the English society, namely, that private life is the place of
honor. Glory, a career, and ambition, words familiar to the longitude
of Paris, are seldom heard in English speech. Nelson wrote from their
hearts his homely telegraph, "England expects every man to do his duty."
For actual service, for the dignity of a profession, or to appease
diseased or inflamed talent, the army and navy may be entered (the worst
boys doing well in the navy); and the civil service, in departments
where serious official work is done; and they hold in esteem the
barrister engaged in the severer studies of the law. But the calm,
sound, and most British Briton shrinks from public life, as
charlatanism, and respects an economy founded on agriculture,
coal-mines, manufactures, or trade, which secures an independence
through the creation of real values.
They wish neither to command or obey, but to be kings in their own
houses. They are intellectual and deeply enjoy literature; they like
well to have the world served up to them in books, maps, models, and
every mode of exact information, and, though not creators in the art,
they value its refinement. They are ready for leisure, can direct and
fill their own day, nor need so much as others the constraint of a
necessity. But the history of the nation discloses, at every turn, this
original predilection for private independence, and, however this
inclination may have been disturbed by the bribes with which their vast
colonial power has warped men out of orbit, the inclination endures, and
forms and reforms the laws, letters, manners, and occupations. They
choose that welfare which is compatible with the commonwealth, knowing
that such alone is stable; as wise merchants prefer investments in three
per cents.